


pretty baby

by WildlyJourneyed



Category: Original Work
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, He's not underage but he IS a student, M/M, Multi, Power Imbalance, Survival Sex Work, Underage Drinking, mentions of drug overdose, mentions of drug use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:27:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26004925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WildlyJourneyed/pseuds/WildlyJourneyed
Summary: Her fingertips ghost the edges of the black eye that’s just starting to darken, and Asphodel knows even at twelve years old that this won’t change anything.  He knows who Hera is, knows it’s just a drug, knows that Mama loves him too but not more than Hera(heroin, he knows, and even though she never takes her clients home he can smell them when she holds him close).He leans into the press of her fingers and hopes the pain will remind him to be angry. It never does.
Kudos: 3





	pretty baby

Mama is crying the way she always does the days before she meets _Hera_ , the way she always does when Asphodel’s little face has the beginnings of a bruise. Her hands are so gentle on him as she cradles his cheeks between her palms, her pretty brown eyes rimmed red and smeared with day old mascara.

“Oh, my pretty baby,” she sobs between apologies, “my beautiful baby.”

Her fingertips ghost the edges of the black eye that’s just starting to darken, and Asphodel knows even at twelve years old that this won’t change anything. He knows who Hera is, knows it’s just a drug, knows that Mama loves him too but not more than Hera _(heroin, he knows, and even though she never takes her clients home he can smell them when she holds him close)_.

He leans into the press of her fingers and hopes the pain will remind him to be angry. It never does.

Demy and Asphodel Sharpe exist outside of paper trails. Asphodel asks when he’s nine whether “Asphodel” is his real name: he’s never seen his birth certificate. Demy swears up and down that it’s his name, because she chose it for the meaning. She knows Greek mythology like the lines of her hands, her palms and fingertips, across the many pages of the many books she keeps on the single bookcase they own. She calls him her little flower. He coasts through public school on a mix of lies and subsidies. Demy sucks the truth through her teeth and spits golden falsehoods to spin Asp a better future.

She dies of an overdose several weeks before his eighteenth birthday. The system juggles him a little, tossing him around as they search the apartment and take anything of note. Asphodel already knew where the money was, and he hides it away before the authorities can take it. They debate putting him into foster care, but Demy’s best friend takes Asphodel in for the duration of his purgatory between “too young” and “old enough”.

Thea’s smile is stained in the low porch light as Asphodel struggles to carry his single overstuffed bag, the waistband of his underwear lined with rolled bunches of dollar bills and hidden under the baggy hem of his sweatshirt.

“Pretty baby, you’re safe here.” She says, and Asphodel knows it’s true, but only when he’s able to stay within the boundaries of the house. He turns eighteen. He can’t get a job without a social security number, can’t get a bank account, and he hides his mother’s old drug money under a floor board next to his closet. Thea mostly leaves him to his own devices—but she’s not unkind. Just distant, lost in her own struggles. He thinks she uses, too. He knows she works the way his mama did, but just like Demy, Thea never takes clients home.

Unlike Demy, Thea gives Asphodel an idea of what the job is like.

“You don’t want to be a street walker,” she tells him, eyes rimmed red and hardly focused. “Get lined up with a club. There’s some around here, they take you on. For a fee. But if you get good, you don’t need to pay that. You can get regular clients, y’know? Just don’t start using.” She’s not really looking at him. She sees through him, like she’s talking to Demy. And she is, Asphodel realizes—Thea sees his mother when she looks at him.

He does, too.

Senior year starts off empty and devoid of feeling. But his refuge, as always, is the library. He stays long after the final bells, picking up anything that catches his fancy once his homework is done. He’s not the best student but he wants to get to college, someday—if he can ever afford it. He’s at the library every day. There are two librarians: Mr. Patrick who’s tired and generally hides away, and the new Ms. Tygan, who takes a liking to Asphodel when he starts asking her for book referrals.

He knows what her glances mean, has seen them enough on Thea’s other friends when they come over. But this isn’t Thea’s house, where she steers them away and keeps Demy’s boy safe. Ms. Tygan offers to drive him home some few months into the year, and during the drive it becomes a completely different conversation.

“Honey, you look like you’re starving. Why don’t I make you dinner? I’ll drop you off home after.” They both know Asphodel doesn’t have a curfew, doesn’t really even have a home. He chews his lip and genuinely thinks it through—he’s hungry but he can feed himself, it’s just been so long since someone else _cared_. Even if it means what he thinks it does.

“Okay, Ms. Tygan. Thank you.” She turns left at the next stoplight and rounds back a few blocks. She has a nice little apartment with hanging plants and so very, very many books. Asphodel runs his fingers across them as she shuffles into the kitchen, making good on her word to cook dinner. He can’t remember the last time he ate home cooked food, at least not the boxed kind, and all she's made is some kind of white pasta. But there’s bacon and flavor and she lets him eat as much as he wants. He wants to eat more. He wants to eat it all, actually, but years of small portions leave him with a half-eaten plate and he smiles apologetically. It doesn’t matter.

He spends the next hour between her thighs, letting her dictate how to eat her out the way she likes it. He’s never been with anyone before and that surprises her, “Pretty baby, you’re telling me you’ve never been in love?”

It’s a cruel way of putting it, he thinks, his tongue pressed to her clit and her hands in his hair. He’s never been in love, and just because he’s with her doesn’t mean he loves her now. His palette is a mess of the pasta he’d eaten and the taste of her cunt, and he thinks he might throw up but if this is what it takes to get what he wants then _fuck it_ , it’s not like he has much left anyway. She comes quietly, her thighs shaking around his head, and just like she promised she takes him home.

Thea looks at him, his swollen mouth and his glazed eyes, and for once she’s sober enough to tell him, “Don’t do it for free.”

Ms. Tygan takes him home every Friday, and she cooks him dinner before he goes down on her. Eventually it becomes more than that, though she never asks him to fuck her—she doesn’t like penetration, she tells him, and it’s not like Asphodel asked but he’s relieved. He stays the night, and she makes breakfast, and it could feel normal except that he still goes to school and she starts giving him an allowance: enough money that he doesn’t worry so much about buying new clothes. She likes to pick them for him, casual jeans and soft shirts. It’s a cold Sunday morning in January when she looks at him, thoughtful, and gets out of bed to rummage through her closet. Asphodel watches, admiring the curve of her naked back, and when she emerges with a silk robe he obediently gets out of bed.

“Diaphanous,” she says, lips quirking in approval, “you’re so pretty, baby.”

He cinches the robe around his waist and he leans back so she can sit on his face, using him the way she always does even though she likes to pretend it’s anything more. She hits him, sometimes. Not hard enough to bruise but enough to sting, and she kisses the pain away but it doesn’t feel like much, anyway. He almost wishes she would bruise him.

It doesn’t mean anything.

She pays for his ACT testing fees, for a few more outfits. And then he graduates and she kisses his cheek, Thea glowering from the sidelines.

“Let me know if you need anything,” she says, and Asphodel knows that’s her way of letting him go. He and Thea head home, and for the first time he gets drunk.

He hates it. He does it the next night anyway, and the next, until he feels brave enough to ask Thea, “What now?”

She looks at him, her eyes glassy the way they always are when she sees Demy instead of Asphodel.

“You’re pretty, baby. I think you know what you can do.”

Asphodel knows what he can do. He follows Thea to work, gets himself acquainted, acts as an errand boy and a bus boy and a lap dancer before he works up the courage to suck dick in an alleyway. He won’t do it unless there’s protection. He lets them hit him in return, their hands around his neck like they can’t get off unless there’s some kind of risk involved. He doesn’t really blame them. It feels better when it hurts, like maybe softness is too shallow and only pain gets deep enough under his skin to register.

Thea overdoses when he’s 19, a few months out of high school and suddenly homeless. He’s got money saved up from his mom’s stash, and from Thea’s stash, and from his own. And it’s not like it’s hard to find places to sleep, not when there are so many people looking to take a pretty thing home each night. He gets good at what he does—really fucking good. Good enough to have his own tiny studio apartment, where the landlord doesn’t ask him to suck dick or eat pussy.

He takes Thea’s advice—curates a list of regulars, aims for wealthier clients. He sleeps with a man in a three piece suit one night, a man with a preference for choking and too chatty for what Asphodel assumes is his line of work: illegal arms dealings and a hand in human trafficking.

“Don’t worry, pretty baby.” He says, threading his fingers through Asphodel’s hair and tugging so that he can see the bruises on his neck better, “I wanna keep you to myself. For now.”

Asphodel just smiles and wonders when this one will let him go.

It’s a few weeks after his twentieth birthday when that same man takes him out, not for the first time, to a business meeting. But it’s the first time he meets Rowan Donovan, a scary type with intense hazel eyes, and Asphodel has to play extra nice when his usual client takes him home and fucks him so hard that he bruises on his thighs.

“Pretty baby,” his _usual_ breathes, panting and heavy on top of him, “you’re too pretty for your own good.”

Asphodel shuts his eyes instead of rolling them, thinks of how meaningless any of that is.

Nothing has been for his own good.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm gonna rework this later because there's more detail to add, but it's good for now.


End file.
